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Free Software Howto

irc

irc is an old text-based internet chat system that still gets used by many projects.

irssi is a good client for irc. You can find out how to set it up, including how to configure it to automatically connect to servers and channels here .

It’s best to run irssi in a GNU screen session on a remote server and then connect to that when you want to chat. This allows you to keep track of conversations in channels even when you are not online. Here’s a script to do this. Save it as irc somewhere on your PATH (e.g. in the bin directory in your HOME), chmod +x it, and then it’s easy.

#!/bin/bash
SSH_HOST=your.host.name.possibly.of.the.form.username@your.host.name
IRSSI_SESSION=irc
ssh -t ${SSH_HOST} "screen -dr ${IRSSI_SESSION} || \
screen -S ${IRSSI_SESSION} irssi"